July 2009

July 25, 2009

• I walked into the studio about 51:40 into Part 1 of the show, while Cort was discussing his disappointment with "The Hangover." Then I talked about getting my 22-year-old bicycle all spruced up for the 21st century.

• During Part 2, we talked about "Orphan," "The Hurt Locker," the dangers of the critical pack deciding to "champion" (and thus over-praise) a small movie, what makes a good horror flick, and why you might want to see "Land of the Lost" with beer this week.

If "Orphan" had gone just a little further over-the-top, we might have had a truly crazy midnight movie on our hands.

It's a thriller telling the story of two clueless Yuppie parents (Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard) who adopt a 9-year-old Russian orphan (Isabelle Fuhrman) named Esther. Esther slowly reveals herself to be a homicidal nutjob with a ruthlessly adult talent for mind-games; it's as if she were secretly reared by abusive Eastern-bloc gangsters who handed her a box-cutter and told her, "Go play with the foolish Americans." (The truth is actually stranger than that.)

When Esther is unleashed in full wack-job mode -- glaring and setting fires and screeching and swearing and corrupting the natural-born kids in the house and doing wet grisly things with knives and rocks -- "Orphan" is campy bad-seed horror-comedy fun. (If they cast Fuhrman as the vampire in the planned American adaptation of "Let the Right One In," I might even give that remake a chance.) All the children in the film give unusually subtle performances for this kind of flick, and Farmiga and Sarsgaard find a couple of nice interpersonal moments. Throw in one clever twist, an opening dream sequence straight out of "It’s Alive" and Karel Roden turning up to give a loopy bit of exposition, and there are enough insane moments to make this a worthy midnight rental.

Unfortunately, you'll have to fast-forward through a lot of that rental, because the movie pads the good stuff out with a bunch of mediocre mainstream-thriller junk. It takes too long to get started, it pulls some key punches, its dialogue is deeply uninteresting, it relies way too heavily on endless jump-scares and its finale is pure slasher-flick, cat-and-mouse, multiple-endings formula.

Anyway, I'm recommending the movie with this boulder-sized grain of salt: If you see it in a theater, you'll best enjoy it if you regard the wacked-out stuff as the marbits in an otherwise bland bowl of Lucky Charms.

July 14, 2009

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" strikes me as being -- by an order of magnitude -- the strongest (or at least the most mature, subtle and emotional) entry in the series thus far.

The teen stars have all sprouted into hormonal little proto-adults, and they all turn in their calmest, most nuanced performances yet as boarding-school wizards fighting the growing threat of Lord Voldemort. (Emma Watson's eyebrows make perhaps the biggest acting breakthrough of all by remaining, I kid you not, almost entirely still for the movie's entire 153-minute running time.)

Best of all, director David Yates avoids shoving "magic" and "wonder" down the viewer's throat at every turn -- instead diving more deeply into the relationships and the drama than previous installments.

It probably doesn't hurt that "Half-Blood Prince," the sixth story in the series, breaks with tradition on several key levels. For starters, it's far less driven by a self-contained Scooby-Doo mystery than earlier entries, and finally lays out some key bits of backstory. This time, Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) gives Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) an undercover gig: Get close to daffy, regretful Potions professor Horace Slughorn (played by Jim Broadbent, who's fantastic, even when he's asked to give a sad speech about his pet fish).

Harry's mission is to find out the deadly secret Slughorn learned but never shared about young Voldemort. It's a secret that could provide the key to finally stopping "the most dangerous dark wizard of all time" -- even as that dark wizard starts mounting supernatural terrorist attacks and plotting key assassinations.

But the Dumbledore/Harry buddy-cop movie frequently takes a back seat to a more relatable mystery: adolescence.

Yates also directed the fifth film, "Order of the Phoenix," and gave that movie's relatively thin story a more relaxed tone -- dwelling on character bits, conversations and the beginnings of teen romance. In "Half-Blood Prince," Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves take all that quite a bit further, working with stronger source material by J.K. Rowling. The new film is awash in (occasionally hilarious) teen confusion, and the cast steps up to meet the challenge of their increasingly mature dialogue.

There's an especially wonderful arc for Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), who finds his niche (and an adoring female fan base) as the new Quidditch goalie, and Alan Rickman finally delivers on the promise of his casting by getting to do more than glower dyspeptically as Professor Snape. Even "Potter" actors who weren't known for their subtlety in previous films manage to up their game: Tom Felton in particular dredges up a surprising (for him) amount of anguish as Draco Malfoy, who may not be quite as evil as he imagines himself to be. It's a major breakthrough.

But that's the minor miracle of "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince": Six films in, it almost feels like it's booting up a new-and-improved, darker, earthier, more grown-up and visually sophisticated trilogy. (The next and final novel is being adapted as two films, to be shot back-to-back and released starting in 2010).

Yes, on one level, the series is simply maturing with its characters (and the "Harry Potter" audience), but there's more going on here than that. The first few "Potter" films certainly had their charms, especially the gorgeous fan-favorite "Prisoner of Azkaban," but they also hammered home that we were entering A World of Magic and Wonder Set to John Williams Music, and there was a certain sameness to the stories. Yates, by contrast, throws away even more seamless special effects as background detail -- focusing on muted character moments and a story that starts building a genuine sense of dread that won't be resolved until sometime in 2011.

Even when Yates pauses to linger on the conjuring -- as he does when Dumbledore and Slughorn cast a spell that causes a room to clean itself -- Yates undercuts it by having Dumbledore say, "That was fun. Mind if I use the loo?," then asks to borrow a knitting magazine. _____

July 10, 2009

From today's Oregonian -- and expanded quite a bit from the print version....

There's precisely one interesting idea in the otherwise agonizing "I Love You, Beth Cooper": It opens with the big fearless declaration-of-love speech they usually save for the end of a teen sex comedy.

We're
dropped into a high-school graduation ceremony. For barely understood
reasons, dweeby valedictorian Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust) is spending
his commencement speech pointing out bullies, anorexics, snobs, and
repressed homosexuals among the assembled students. He caps this
painful, bridge-burning address by declaring his love for head
cheerleader Beth (Hayden Panettiere).

To put it mildly, this speech is not met by the movie-trademark slow clap.

Afterward,
Beth and her posse turn up at Denis' lame graduation party, mostly to
have a retaliatory laugh at his expense -- but so does Beth's raging,
coked-up boyfriend. This (violently) kicks off an all-night, booze- and
drug-fueled chase, during which Beth and Denis theoretically get to
know each other while breaking dozens of laws and causing six figures'
worth of property damage.

The filmmakers clearly want this
reckless behavior to seem transgressive, but none of it is clever
enough for that. Mostly, everything Denis and Beth and their friends do
just seems illegal, illogical and stupid. For example: At one point in
a mountain cabin, one kid grabs a shotgun off the mantle and points it
at a couple of girls to punctuate his terrible John Wayne impression.
The girls look alarmed. We never find out if the gun was loaded. It's
not funny; it just makes you flinch.

I was stunned to learn that
"Beth Cooper" was created by actual filmmaking veterans. The screenplay
was adapted by former "Simpsons" writer Larry Doyle from his well-liked
young-adult novel, and the film was directed by "Gremlins" writer and
"Harry Potter" helmer Chris Columbus. Mostly, I was stunned because
rarely have two seasoned Hollywood professionals produced something so
painfully, amateurishly and relentlessly unfunny. Every single
one-liner and bit of comic business falls flat, and it's all the more
painful because the film is edited with pauses for nonexistent
laughter.

Panettiere has nothing to do here but look cocky or
wild or cute or sad and yell "Woo!" a lot. As written, Beth is a
cipher, something to put on a pedestal -- manic pixie dream trash. (She's also a reckless and very likely drunk driver, but the movie seems to regard this as a charming personality quirk.)

Jack
T. Carpenter hints at genuine comic charisma as Denis' movie-mad and
possibly gay best friend, but he's dog-paddling against the raging tide
of foolishness generated by the directorial, screenwriting and editing
departments. Oh, and Denis' put-upon dad is played by the actor who
played Cameron in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," so that's kind of funny,
I guess.

But I have another issue with the movie, and it's this:
Denis embodies a rom-com fantasy that I've come to regard as not only
false, but actually sort of dangerous.

Denis -- our
yearning-nerd hero -- is a weak, nebbishy, one-dimensional stalker.
He's pasted a giant photo of Beth above his bed for the usual reasons.
(Beth sees this photo and shrugs it off as mildly offbeat teen-boy
behavior, BTW.) Throughout the movie, Denis does little more than
whimper and plead and hesitate and whine. He exhibits not one iota of
charm for 101 straight minutes. But Denis nevertheless believes that a
single grand romantic gesture (his creepy speech) will make the hottest
girl in school magically "understand" and fall in love with him.

And, worst of all, the movie rewards him for it.

Denis
isn't interested in Beth Cooper. He's interested in possessing his
mythological construct of her. (Yeah, the script makes some noise about
Denis needing to fall in love with "who Beth really is" -- but because
the script never follows up on this by actually introducing us
to "who Beth really is," I'm calling shenanigans.) The filmmakers
actually have Beth Cooper get all kissy-face on this half-formed,
stalkerish, 100-percent-unappealing dweeb -- even though he never does
anything to actually entice the woman who's been drunk-driving him all
over town. It's another shovelful of wish-fulfillment B.S. on the
teen-sex-comedy compost pile.

I might forgive some of this intellectual and moral bankruptcy if the movie was actually funny. But it rather stunningly isn't._____

The pile of old "Star Wars" toys I found in my parents' attic. I brought them into the studio in honor of Friday night's Bagdad screening of "The Empire Strikes Back." Also discussed: an old Sega "Star Wars" game in which Admiral Ackbar sounded like he ran a Jewish deli, and a preview of the trailer reel Fatboy put together for the "Empire" screening.

My disappointed reaction to Michael Mann's latest crime epic, "Public Enemies." I also try to make a case for Mann's "Miami Vice" movie.